Pope Tawadros in California

17-10-2015 09:33 PM

Mariam Rifaat

Pope Tawadros II is now in California where he was received by Bishop Serapion of LA, South California and Hawaii. This is the last leg of the Pope’s first US visit which started on 7 October in Atlanta. He has already been to Georgia and Texas where he met the congregation and clergy of the Coptic Orthodox parish of the Southern US. The Pope is expected to complete three weeks in the US before heading back home to Cairo.

In Anaheim, California, the Pope with some 2,900 young men and women of the Coptic Orthodox Church there. A space had been leased at the Rock Church to accommodate the number. Pope Tawadros invited the young people to visit Egypt. He told them that a special centre had been set up at the Anba Bishoi monastery in Wadi Natroun in the Western Desert to receive and serve young people who come from outside Egypt for visits.

The Pope said that young Copts have the responsibility of acting as bridges between the their roots in the East steeped in tradition, and their current home countries in the West where development and technology reign. This task, he said, required the utmost wisdom. He also talked about love, stressing that Christian love should fill our lives and behaviour. “Love is the greatest word in the Bible,” he said. “God Himself is Love; whoever does not love does not know God. And love never fails.”

Before leaving Texas last Wednesday, Pope Tawadros presided over Holy Mass at the St Mary and St Moses the Black Abbey in Corpus Christi. This is the second Coptic Orthodox monastery to be founded in North America; it was established in the 1970s. The first is St Anthony’s in California, established in 2005.

Reaching Out

Watani started as an Egyptian weekly Sunday newspaper published in Cairo. The word Watani is Arabic for “My Homeland”. The paper was founded in 1958 by the prominent Copt Antoun Sidhom (1915 – 1995), who strove for the establishment of a civil, democratic society in Egypt, where all Egyptians would enjoy full citizenship rights regardless of their religious denomination. To this day when Watani is published as a weekly paper and an online news site, the objective remains the same. Those in charge of Watani view this role as a patriotic all-Egyptian vocation. Special attention is given to shedding light on Coptic culture and tradition as authentically Egyptian, this being a topic largely disregarded or little-understood by Egypt’s media. Watani is deeply dedicated to offer its readers high quality, extensive, objective, credible and well-researched media coverage, with special focus on Coptic issues, culture, heritage, and contribution to Egyptian society.